From TomPaine.com :
The Perfect Stonewall
David Corn
June 21, 2006
(After a brief hiatus to work on a book about the selling of the Iraq war and the CIA leak case, David Corn is back writing his twice-monthly column, "The Loyal Opposition" for TomPaine.com. Corn is also the Washington editor of The Nation and is the author of The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown Publishers). Read his blog at http://www.davidcorn.com. )
Future presidents and press secretaries will owe much to George W. Bush and Scott McClellan—that is, if they ever want to mount a cover up. A week after Karl Rove's lawyer announced he was no longer under investigation by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald in the CIA leak case, it's rather clear that Rove and the White House pulled perfected the art of stonewalling. They—and this caper—will be an inspiration to spinners everywhere.
In July 2003, when columnist Bob Novak (first) and Time magazine (second) published stories disclosing that Valerie Wilson was a CIA officer—and cited administration officials as their sources—the White House responded with a simple denial. McClellan, who had just inherited the White House press secretary position from Ari Fleischer, said of this leak, "That is not the way this president or this White House operates." There was no wiggle room in that statement.
Months later, once the news broke that the Justice Department—acting in response to a CIA request—would be investigating the leak, the White House got more specific. Scott McClellan stated that any White House aide who leaked information on Valerie Wilson would be dismissed, and he asserted that neither Karl Rove nor Scooter Libby had been involved in the leak. Months after that, Bush reaffirmed that the leaker—if discovered—would be booted from his White House.
This was all unambiguous. It ain't us. It ain't Rove. It ain't Libby. And if we knew who had done this, he'd be run out of town. This straight talk got the White House all the way through the 2004 elections.
Eventually the strategy shifted—because it had to. In July 2005, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff revealed an e-mail written by Time correspondent Matt Cooper that showed (with no doubt) that Rove—on "double super secret background"—had told Cooper that Valerie Wilson worked at the CIA and had "authorized" the 2002 trip her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had taken to Niger to check out the allegation that Saddam Hussein had been uranium-shopping there. The e-mail was incontrovertible proof that Rove had leaked—that he had passed to a reporter classified information (for Valerie Wilson's employment at the CIA was indeed classified, as special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald would later confirm), while the White House was trying to discredit a White House critic.
This e-mail was out of sync with the White House's clear-cut denials. And the disclosure of this e-mail raised a question: would Bush stick to his promise to fire the leaker? The answer was not long in coming: no. But there was more. Now that Rove was clearly pegged as a leaker, the White House came up with a new response: it could not say anything while the investigation was under way. Forget that it had done so repeatedly—that was before it had been caught fibbing about the president's chief strategist.
Those disciplined folks at the White House then clung to its we-cannot-comment lifeline for months. Whenever Bush or McClellan were asked about the leak, the reply was the same: while the investigation is going on, we can't say. And that stance came in handy when Scooter Libby was indicted last fall.
McClellan claimed that Fitzgerald had asked the White House to refrain from commenting on the case, but the press secretary refused to explain anything about that request (even the date that it had been made). At one White House press briefing, I asked McClellan if he would acknowledge that—despite whatever Fitzgerald had requested of the White House—the president was free to take action on his own to deal with the leak. After all, evidence in the public record now indicated a leaker (Rove) was in the highest circles in the White House. Still, McClellan stuck to the script: We cannot comment on an ongoing investigation.
Then last week—after Rove was cut loose by Fitzgerald—Bush said, "I've made the comments I'm going to make about this incident, and I'm going to put this part of the situation behind us and move forward." Wait a minute. Before the investigation was over, Bush and the White House had said they couldn't say anything until the investigation was over. Now that the Rove investigation was over, Bush was saying he had already addressed the matter and it was time to move on.
That was a pretty transparent dodge—duck the issue, duck the issue, duck the issue, then say the issue has already been dealt with and now is old news. But it worked. The media mash did move on to other stories. This was quite an accomplishment for the Bush White House. It had been faced with a smoking-gun piece of evidence proving that the president's most important aide had leaked and that the White House had misled the public about this, and the political price it had to pay was essentially nothing.
Compare this with Bill Clinton's travails. When he was first confronted by the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he went into automatic denial mode. ("I did not have sex with that woman.") But when he came face to face with a stained dress bearing his DNA, he admitted that he had an inappropriate relationship with the intern. He had tried to hold out as long as he could, but he couldn't deny reality. The Bush White House just did exactly that. The evidence about Rove? Sorry, we can't talk about it.
Theses two scandals are hardly parallel case studies. It just may be—for some reason—harder for a politician to get away with a lie about sex than a lie about a possible violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. But the point is that the Bush gang stonewalled exquisitely. Democrats have reason to be frustrated that Rove—the fellow they despise as the evil genius responsible for many of their woes—escaped the clutches of Patrick Fitzgerald.
Worse, though, is that Rove and the Bush White House have set an example for others to follow.
Wrap...
No comments:
Post a Comment